Some High Notes Are Just Screams

The Canadian musical comedy “Stage Fright” unveils its lone showstopping number early on, as a bus full of kids pulls into theater camp: the one place they aren’t outcasts. As a sad sack sings of being “beaten up a dozen times for singing Stephen Sondheim’s rhymes,” the film offers a glimpse of exactly the sort of demented, toe-tapping sensibility you’d expect from a tuneful summer camp farce — in which a serial killer is on the loose.

Perhaps, like those youths, the movie — featuring music and lyrics by Jerome Sable, who is also the director, and Eli Batalion — proves more precocious than accomplished. It’s inspired enough to draw attention to ways that it doesn’t realize its potential.

Naturally, the focus is on a rising star, Camilla (Allie MacDonald), whose mother (Minnie Driver) was stabbed to death after originating the leading role in “The Haunting of the Opera.” (The kid gloves treatment of Andrew Lloyd Webber can’t hold a candle to the “South Park” film’s torching of “Les Misérables.”) Camilla and her brother (Douglas Smith) now work as the camp’s cooks. Ominously, this year’s play will be a 10th-anniversary production of “Haunting.”

The shoddy plotting — Did the mother’s murder go unsolved? Does the siblings’ adoptive father (Meat Loaf) run the camp single-handedly? — is just pretext for Brian De Palma-esque pastiche, including a killer who sings heavy metal. Give the movie some zip, a few memorable songs and a stronger third act, and (to paraphrase Mr. Sondheim) something good’s just out of reach.